The following description of background art may include insights, discoveries, understandings or disclosures, or associations together with disclosures not known to the relevant art prior to the present invention but provided by the invention. Some of such contributions of the invention may be specifically pointed out below, whereas other such contributions of the invention will be apparent from their context.
The use of sensor networks in buildings and other environments has increased in recent years. Sensors may be used to measure different physical parameters such as temperature, humidity, sound and movement, for example. Information gathered from the sensors may be used in various applications, such as home automation or environment monitoring for security or other purposes. The sensor networks may be wired or wireless. The wireless approach to sensor networks has gained interest lately with the development of wireless low power communication techniques.
Low-power wireless networks, such as IEEE 802.15.4 based embedded and sensor networks, are very energy efficient, and the chip technology is cheap. For this reason the technology is making its way to embedded devices very quickly for automation, measurement, tracking and control, for example. However, these networks have very limited resources for transmitting information.
Currently application protocols for IP-based low-power wireless networks are designed and implemented in a customary way with each application designer making a byte format of their own, usually useable only within that network. Thus, connecting a wireless sensor network through a device acting as a router to a local or remote application using the sensor network is a very proprietary setup. Each sensor network is treated as a separate domain. An application-specific local solution is always required for using the network. At present, an application requesting to use such sensor networks has to support each kind of network separately. Each network may have its own resource discovery and data communication technique, which may even be application or vendor specific.
In addition, several different communication techniques are in use, such as IEEE 802.15.4-based solutions or Bluetooth Ultra Low Power (ULP) solutions. These solutions are incompatible with each other. Therefore, a mobile device trying to access a local wireless sensor network may be faced with an incompatible wireless technology. Although accessing the local resource through the Internet is sometimes a solution, it is not always practical or even possible. This is a very cumbersome situation especially if the intention is to make the use of sensor networks accessible to mobile devices on a large scale.